It\’s Friday night, and as I wander toward the entrance of Temple Emanuel, a Reform synagogue in Beverly Hills, an usher approaches and asks brightly, \”Are you with the choir?\” I\’m African American, but I\’m not with the choir, at least not with the choir of Temple Bryant A.M.E. Church, which is visiting the synagogue tonight. I smile through a twinge of annoyance.
A voice expert known for coaching singers and nonsingers, and working with deaf and autistic students and contestants for TV shows like \”Extreme Makeover\” and \”American Idol,\” Coury is unique and considered \”revolutionary.\”
Inside this cavernous barn with Persian rugs draped like curtains over the back walls of the elevated stage, there are no mobsters or secret cells from what we can tell. There are just ordinary citizens, but that doesn\’t stop the host, Jordan Elgrably, a svelte man in a black shirt, from saying, \”All those who are working here for Homeland Security, please raise your hand.\”
Surrounded by seven young children, Yehuda Richter tells me over Shabbat lunch how he decided to move from Los Angeles to Elon Moreh, a settlement on the outskirts of the place Jews call Shechem and the Arabs call Nablus.
At one point the neighborhood was considered so dangerous, people were afraid to walk the streets at night, but now it is experiencing something of a renaissance among Jews and non-Jews alike.
We had no idea if we would be the only ones to brave the cold and damp but were pleasantly surprised; about 30 people made up our tour.
The best way to discover Mozart here might be a night at the Vienna Opera. I was lucky enough to attend a performance of \”The Magic Flute\” during my visit, which was sponsored by Austria Tourism. This was classical Mozart through and through in terms of the music, but the performance was strikingly modern.
It\’s not surprising that my husband is the first in line at one of the earliest \”Kong\” press screenings. He\’s loved the giant simian since he first watched the 1933 classic film on TV when he was 7.
The only thing worse than going to most luncheons is having to write about them — blow-by-blows of well-meaning, well-deserved appreciations and thank yous and speeches that go on too long.
A few days ago an AP news photo featured a plain white box labeled, \”Letters to God.\” A rabbi was taking them out one by one and placing them into the cracks of Jerusalem\’s Western Wall. The unopened letters joined the other messages, prayers and communications crammed into the interstices between Wall\’s stones by visitors great and small — from children who have just learned to write to one from Pope John Paul II himself. When the Israel postal service sorters come upon a letter addressed to the Almighty, they direct it to a special pile for delivery at the Wall in Jerusalem.
>I\’m sitting between the two most different women imaginable here at Temple Emmanuel in Beverly Hills: a matronly lumpish type who is well past her 50s, unmade up with short, graying hair and long triangular earrings — her only testament, of sorts, to fashion; and on the other side of me, a plasticized lady of the same indeterminate age, wearing a black leather miniskirt and crocodile skin yellow boots and an expression on her face — if one can call the pearly botoxed look an expression — of disbelief and shock.
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